Women & Work - All the essential updates from July 2023

News, research, data, and recommendations about women and work - curated by our team

Jul 31, 2023

July has brought many wins for women’s work, and we have collated them here for you. But of course, there are also more sobering developments and grim gaps that remain. We hope you will find this edition useful and informative.

To everyone who is new here: At the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA), we are working on an ambitious project to understand and find ways to overcome the demand-side barriers that are keeping women out of the workforce.

We are curating ‘Women & Work’ with the hope that it can provoke, stimulate and amplify conversations about women’s participation in paid work in India. You can access previous editions of this newsletter here.

Please do share this edition on your social media, and with your friends, family and colleagues. Thank you!

🗞️In The News

For the first time, an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) will have an off-shore campus outside of India. It will also be the first time that any IIT will be headed by a woman (Yes, you read that right - a first!). Earlier this month, IIT Madras announced that it will soon start a campus in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Preeti Aghalayam has been appointed its director-in-charge, a milestone appointment for the premier Indian institute. Read more here.

In some delightful news, the International Cricket Council (ICC) announced equal prize money for men’s and women’s teams at comparable global events. Last year, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had announced equal match fees for Indian male and female cricket players.
In the meantime, the FIFA Women’s Football World Cup, which is currently ongoing, will still be many steps away from any pay parity. While FIFA has increased the prize money for the tournament this year, the winning team will take home USD 150 million - three times that of the previous World Cup - it will be still only a fraction of the corresponding award money that went to the winner of the men’s World Cup last year (USD 440 million). Read an analysis by CNN for more.

In another historic development, in South Korea, Hyundai has hired women in technical roles for the first time ever. This happened after it allowed women to apply for technical roles for the first time since 1967, Bloomberg reported. This was made possible thanks to pressure from worker unions to improve gender equality. Read more here.

The UN General Assembly has adopted a resolution to observe October 29 as the International Day of Care and Support. This is to recognise the role of care, a predominant share of which is done by women around the world.
“UN Women welcomes the establishment of the International Day of Care and Support by the General Assembly. Most unpaid care work is undertaken by women and girls, and its recognition by Member States is crucial for progress on gender equality and sustainable development,” Sima Bahous, Executive Director of UN Women wrote on Twitter, in response to the development.

On a related and sombre note, caregiving was cited by a majority of women in Kerala as the reason why they quit their jobs in an online survey conducted by the Kerala Knowledge Economy Mission. The findings are based on a survey of 4,458 women job aspirants from 1,027 community development societies across Kerala. The survey was conducted between April 17 and May 17 this year.
Over half (57 percent) of the women surveyed said they had to give up their career due to caregiving, a fifth cited relocation due to marriage as the reason why they had to quit work. 460 respondents cited low wages, 147 blamed lack of transportation for their career break and 175 respondents said they had to give up their jobs since their families were opposed to it. The ray of hope? Nearly all (97 percent to be precise) respondents said they were interested in restarting their career. Read more in this report from The Hindu.
In the meantime, Disney has been accused of “systematically” paying women less than men and a lawsuit has been filed against the company in a California-based court in the USA. According to the complaint, the company owes women USD 150 million in wages! The complaint analyses salary data to show that female employees at the company were paid 2 percent less than their male colleagues between April 2015 and December 2022. Which way this case goes could be quite a landmark. Read more from Forbes and Reuters.

💡Research Spotlight

In last month’s edition, we had written about research demonstrating that pay transparency can reduce the gender wage gap. We build on the same in this edition by spotlighting a related study, this time from the United States of America.

It is not a revelation to many of us that women often end up undervaluing their own labour, and expecting and demanding lower wages than men. There are reasons for this of course, it’s not simply that women like to have less money (not at all). But factors such as lower confidence and information asymmetries all contribute to this undervaluing of their own labour.

Researcher Nina Roussille looked at the implications of this “ask gap” by using data of high-wage workers in the USA.

Representational image. Credits: Kaitlyn Baker/Unsplash

Roussille analysed data from Hired.com, an online job platform catering to full-time engineering jobs. On this platform, candidates who are looking for a job indicate an “ask salary” and firms that are hiring indicate a “bid salary”. The platform also records “final salaries” that are negotiated in cases where a candidate is hired. This is what the research shows:

There was a 6.8 percent “raw gap” between the ask salaries of men and women on the platform. It fell to 2.9 percent after controlling for resume characteristics. As Roussille notes, this 2.9 percent is not small - it translates to USD 3,830 every year, on average.
From the firms’ perspective, there was a raw bid gap of 3.4 percent between bids made to male and female candidates. This fell to 2.2 percent after adjusting for resume characteristics.
Here’s the interesting part: in mid-2018, Hired.com made some design changes to its platform. Earlier, candidates had to fill their ask salary in an empty text box. Now, they would be given a pre-filled value based on the median bid salary over the past 12 months for the candidate’s combination of desired location, job title, and experience, and they could choose the final ask salary based on this. And voila! This led to an elimination of the gender gap, because women increased their ask salary based on this information provided.

“I find no discernable impact on the number of bids that women received or their likelihood to receive a final offer, suggesting that women had effectively been leaving money on the table”, Roussille observed further.

Read the full research paper here.

📊Datapoint

As compared to young men, more young women reported that they had faced a partial cut in their salaries during the Covid-19 pandemic in India, a survey of the young by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)’s Lokniti in collaboration with Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) has found. The survey collected data from 9,316 respondents aged 15 to 34, spread across 18 states of India. Overall, 37 percent respondents reported facing a partial reduction in their salaries in the past two years - among women this share was 44 percent, while among men it was 35 percent.

👍 CEDA Recommends

This edition’s recommendations have been curated especially for our readers by Aparajita Dasgupta, Assistant Professor of Economics at Ashoka University.

What’s an essential academic work that you would recommend to someone who is just getting started with working on the subject of female labour force participation?

Aparajita Dasgupta: For a start, I would recommend Jayachandran(2015) ‘The roots of gender inequality in developing countries’, a very nice overview to think systematically about the mechanisms that drive gender gap in various outcomes.
I’d also recommend two papers that situate the gender norms in the nexus of labour and environment: Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn (2013) investigate how traditional agricultural practices influence the gender roles in the society and Carranza (2014), who demonstrates how the problem of missing women in India can be linked to female labour market opportunities as driven by soil endowments in a region.

Anything published in the news media recently that shed light on an important aspect about women’s work in India?

This World Bank blog post by Janneke Pieters and Stephan Klasen gives a nice framework to think about the decline in female labour force participation, invoking the demand and the supply side channels.

Is there a film that you can recommend which, in your opinion, does a good job of portraying the world of work?

I have a few! The first is Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar which portrays the journey of a middle-class homemaker from a conservative family in Calcutta in early 60’s, who takes up a sales job against the wishes of her father-in-law. As her husband loses his job, she becomes the sole earner in the family. Gradually, she finds her confidence and her voice as she resists workplace discrimination against a female co-worker.
Then, there is A Separation, a film by Asghar Farhadi that brings out a complex interplay of gender roles, religion and class identities in the heart-wrenching Iranian drama. And I’d also recommend Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey - a black comedy film that challenges gender stereotypes as it deals with the important topic of domestic violence. It also subtly handles the issue of gendered investments in children and celebrates the spirit of female entrepreneurship in the face of all odds!

And a book that did the same?

I highly recommend the graphic novel A Rebel with a Paintbrush, which situates the personal and professional journey of the fearless Amrita Sher-Gil, one of modern India’s first professional women artists. I would also like to mention Ashapurna Devi’s body of work with a special mention of her novel Pratham Pratisruti (1964), which portrays the struggle of women in the pursuit of equal rights.

⏳Throwback

In June this year, the Madras High Court ruled that women who are homemakers were entitled to an equal share in property purchased from their husband’s income. The Court was recognising the unpaid work done by the wife in the household while making its observations.

“The contribution which wives make towards acquisition of the family assets by performing their domestic chores, thereby releasing their husbands for gainful employment, would be a factor which, this Court would specifically take into account while deciding the right in the properties either the title stand in the name of the husband or wife and certainly, the spouse who looks after the home and cares for family for decades, entitled to a share in the property,” observed the Court.

The verdict has - rightfully - been hailed as a landmark. But the Courts have not always had such an empathetic understanding of women’s work in the household.

The question of the value of women's unpaid work first came up in Indian courts in 1968. Two women – Hayatibai and Rukhanbai – died after they were hit by a truck on the road in 1959. Their husbands moved the Bombay High Court demanding compensation for medical expenses, expenses incurred on the funeral of the deceased women.

It was while deciding this case that the Court deliberated on the “services” offered by the late wives of the men. The men claimed they would now have to spend money on “servants” for the same services that their wives were earlier providing them. The excerpt below is from the judgement. The Court eventually declined this compensation because it was difficult to calculate. Here’s an excerpt from the judgement:

“Because of her death, he [the husband] had lost the service rendered by her and he had to employ servants to do the service. It appears, however, from his evidence that it is difficult to assess damages on this ground. No doubt, money value for the services which she rendered and in order to obtain which he had to engage servants, has to be fixed. But then cases also show that if there is any benefit by the death, then that also must be considered in computing the damages.”

Read this paper by Prabha Kotiswaran to learn more about how the Court’s ideas about women’s unpaid work have evolved over time. Kotiswaran’s research has also been wonderfully illustrated by Akankshya for EPW Engage - you can explore it here.

Thank you for reading! We will see you next month. In the meantime, if you have feedback, questions, tips, or just want to say hello, feel free to do so by replying to this email, or drop in a word at ceda@ashoka.edu.in.

Curated by: Akshi Chawla for the Centre for Economic Data & Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University. Cover illustration: Nithya Subramanian